Home › Village Receipts › Hermits (One cup sugar two-thirds cup)
Hermits (One cup sugar two-thirds cup)
One cup sugar, two-thirds cup shortening, one-third cup milk, two eggs, two teaspoons cream tartar, one teaspoon soda, one-half teaspoon of all kinds of spices, one cup chopped raisins, a little salt. Delicious.
— Mrs. James Holdridge
A typical village drop cookie, written for a cook who already knew what hermits looked like — which is why the flour never got written down.
- The missing ingredientNo flour is listed, and this dough cannot be made without it. Comparable hermit receipts of the period take about 3 to 3 1/2 cups of flour for this quantity of sugar, egg and shortening — enough for a stiff dough that holds its shape when dropped. Add it gradually and stop when the dough no longer slumps.
- ShorteningIn a book of this vintage "shortening" often means lard, or lard and butter together. Butter gives the better flavour here; two-thirds cup is about 10 2/3 tablespoons.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is homemade baking powder: 2 teaspoons cream of tartar with 1 teaspoon soda is roughly equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. If you substitute, use the powder alone and leave both the tartar and the soda out. Mixed leavening of this kind begins to react as soon as it meets the milk, so get the trays into the oven promptly.
- "All kinds of spices"Half a teaspoon each of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and allspice is one reading of the line, though it may equally have meant half a teaspoon of mixed spice in all; the fuller reading gives a well-spiced but not fierce cookie. Ginger and mace would also have been to hand in many kitchens.
- RaisinsChopping matters — whole raisins sit awkwardly in the dough and are more likely to scorch where they break the surface. Dark seedless raisins chopped coarsely, or pulsed twice in a processor with a spoonful of the flour to keep them from clumping.
- Oven and timeDrop by rounded tablespoons, two inches apart, and bake at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft. Hermits firm as they cool and are meant to stay chewy.
- YieldAbout three dozen cookies of ordinary size. They keep a week in a tin and improve on the second day as the spice settles.
Hermits are a New England cookie, reliably found in later nineteenth-century community cookbooks and everywhere in them by 1900: a soft, spiced, fruited drop cookie built from pantry staples that keeps well in a tin. The name is unexplained — it is often said to refer to the cookie's plain brown appearance, or to how well it keeps in seclusion, but no origin is documented and both explanations look like later guesses. What the receipt really records is the shape of a village recipe exchange. Mrs. Holdridge set down the proportion of sugar to shortening, the leavening and the raisins, and left out flour and oven heat entirely. The single word "Delicious" is the whole of the tasting note.